







Squaring up to the foundational question for language models.
Recursive Language Models: the paradigm of 2026
How we plan to manage extremely long contexts
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How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models
Language models (LMs) can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don’t really learn language and also, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing. On the other side, there have been claims that the success of LMs obviates the need for studying linguistic theory and structure. We argue that both extremes are wrong. LMs can contribute to fundamental questions about linguistic structure, language processing, and learning. They force us to rethink arguments and ways of thinking that have been foundational in linguistics. While they do not replace linguistic structure and theory, they serve as model systems and working proofs of concept for gradient, usage-based approaches to language. We offer an optimistic take on the relationship between language models and linguistics.

How Large Language Models Actually Work
Recursive Language Models
We propose Recursive Language Models (RLMs), an inference strategy where language models can decompose and recursively interact with input context of unbounded length through REPL environments.

Cross-Lingual Exploration for Parametric Knowledge
Parametric knowledge in Large Language Models is not equally accessible across languages. As a result, standard inference techniques often struggle to surface localized facts, leading to failures in...
Tokenization: A Survey for Modern NLP
While modern language models take raw text as their input and produce raw text as output, they do not operate over text directly. Hidden in the very first step of language model pipelines is...

Understanding Understanding: A Pragmatic Framework Motivated by...
Motivated by the rapid ascent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and debates about the extent to which they possess human-level qualities, we propose a framework for testing whether any agent (be it...

Andrej Karpathy on Twitter / X
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for… pic.twitter.com/uMFWTcBCsl— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) October 2, 2026
Language models are multiverse generators
"Actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they were chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form part of the truth."
Measuring short-form factuality in large language models
We present SimpleQA, a benchmark that evaluates the ability of language models to answer short, fact-seeking questions. We prioritized two properties in designing this eval. First, SimpleQA is challenging, as it is adversarially collected against GPT-4 responses. Second, responses are easy to grade, because questions are created such that there exists only a single, indisputable answer. Each answer in SimpleQA is graded as either correct, incorrect, or not attempted. A model with ideal behavior would get as many questions correct as possible while not attempting the questions for which it is not confident it knows the correct answer. SimpleQA is a simple, targeted evaluation for whether models "know what they know," and our hope is that this benchmark will remain relevant for the next few generations of frontier models. SimpleQA can be found at https://github.com/openai/simple-evals.

Measuring short-form factuality in large language models
We present SimpleQA, a benchmark that evaluates the ability of language models to answer short, fact-seeking questions. We prioritized two properties in designing this eval. First, SimpleQA is challenging, as it is adversarially collected against GPT-4 responses. Second, responses are easy to grade, because questions are created such that there exists only a single, indisputable answer. Each answer in SimpleQA is graded as either correct, incorrect, or not attempted. A model with ideal behavior would get as many questions correct as possible while not attempting the questions for which it is not confident it knows the correct answer. SimpleQA is a simple, targeted evaluation for whether models "know what they know," and our hope is that this benchmark will remain relevant for the next few generations of frontier models. SimpleQA can be found at https://github.com/openai/simple-evals.

Stanford CS336 Language Modeling from Scratch I 2025
Are you Slop??
Are you Slop? Analyze your 'slop score' - a measure of how generic or unique your text appears to language models.
Large language models are cultural technologies. What might that mean?
Four different perspectives

Scaling Laws Across Model Architectures: A Comparative Analysis of...
The scaling of large language models (LLMs) is a critical research area for the efficiency and effectiveness of model training and deployment. Our work investigates the transferability and...

I'm creating a series of short form videos about how language models work technically. The goal is to be something in between "you know it's next token prediction" and "now you've taken a machine learning class." I'd love your thoughts so here are the first few! 🧵 youtube.com/shorts/VZB8XCcyllE
How does ChatGPT work? Or rather, language models in general- Part 1 attempting a lay explanation.
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